I was sure I'd told this before, but here we go. It was one of those rare occasions when the right words arrived at the right time instead of hours later (you know how that feels!)

Are you sitting comfortably?

Then I'll begin…

Once upon a time I was travelling on a bus to the city centre from an Eastern (=wealthy) suburb of Adelaide.

The seat I was in was at the front of the bus, but faced backwards.

After a while, an elderly lady got on and started to chat. She clocked my accent and asked the usual questions; how long I'd been in Australia, why I'd come, did I like it, how long I had planned to come to Australia… All this at a raised volume because she was very, very deaf.

The whole bus by this time was silently following our conversation. (Remember, facing backwards I could see them all; a dozen or so people and there was the usual mix of half-a-dozen different races).

I confessed that, although I had made friends I had dreaded coming, indeed had always wanted NEVER to come, because all I'd heard about Australia was the horrible heat, the horrible poisonous animals and the horrible people.

So she asks, in a stage whisper that could have been heard in Sydney:

"You mean the Abos?"

Shocked, I replied. "No! The racist bigots".

She didn't speak to me for the rest of the journey, but it didn't matter; I was getting approving looks from the rest of the passengers!

Tigger_the_Wing wrote:I was sure I'd told this before, but here we go. It was one of those rare occasions when the right words arrived at the right time instead of hours later (you know how that feels!)

Are you sitting comfortably?

Then I'll begin…

Once upon a time I was travelling on a bus to the city centre from an Eastern (=wealthy) suburb of Adelaide.

The seat I was in was at the front of the bus, but faced backwards.

After a while, an elderly lady got on and started to chat. She clocked my accent and asked the usual questions; how long I'd been in Australia, why I'd come, did I like it, how long I had planned to come to Australia… All this at a raised volume because she was very, very deaf.

The whole bus by this time was silently following our conversation. (Remember, facing backwards I could see them all; a dozen or so people and there was the usual mix of half-a-dozen different races).

I confessed that, although I had made friends I had dreaded coming, indeed had always wanted NEVER to come, because all I'd heard about Australia was the horrible heat, the horrible poisonous animals and the horrible people.

So she asks, in a stage whisper that could have been heard in Sydney:

"You mean the Abos?"

Shocked, I replied. "No! The racist bigots".

She didn't speak to me for the rest of the journey, but it didn't matter; I was getting approving looks from the rest of the passengers!

That's great! You must have been so proud of yourself!

Actually, that's not just great, that's fantastic!

A flap of the wings yesterday means big changes tomorrow.Let's work together to keep the present inevitable.

There are quite a lot of Americans on these forums, but one would expect that. The site was started by a chap in the US because of peculiarly US problems with a peculiarly US education system. Also, there are more English-speaking North Americans (USA and Canada) than there are British and Australian people. There are a scattering of people here for whom English is not the first language, but there are Pastafarian sites in other languages so I expect most non-English speakers go to one of them.

I expect that the reason more Australians than others are contributing to this thread is cultural; of the four countries I have mentioned, only Australia teaches Chinese in primary school and only Australia has close cultural ties with China and a lot of Chinese immigration. Many of my and my sons' friends are Chinese, whereas I knew very few Chinese people back home.

I am aware that by the end of this year there will probably be more people who can speak English in China than English speakers in any other country, even India.

Tigger_the_Wing wrote:There are quite a lot of Americans on these forums, but one would expect that. The site was started by a chap in the US because of peculiarly US problems with a peculiarly US education system. Also, there are more English-speaking North Americans (USA and Canada) than there are British and Australian people. There are a scattering of people here for whom English is not the first language, but there are Pastafarian sites in other languages so I expect most non-English speakers go to one of them.

I expect that the reason more Australians than others are contributing to this thread is cultural; of the four countries I have mentioned, only Australia teaches Chinese in primary school and only Australia has close cultural ties with China and a lot of Chinese immigration. Many of my and my sons' friends are Chinese, whereas I knew very few Chinese people back home.

I am aware that by the end of this year there will probably be more people who can speak English in China than English speakers in any other country, even India.

May I ask where you are, Reki?

I couldn't find a good Chinese Pastafarian website though, you would have thought it would be possible seeing that FSM has its own page on the Chinese version of Wikipedia... I didn't find the whole Chinese/Australia relationship surprising, because I do know that there are many Chinese immigrants there (though I have to say, knowing that they teach Chinese in primary school is really a pleasant surprise!) since, well, I do have friends there.

I highly doubt that there would be more people who can speak English in China though. They would mostly be concentrated around the economic hubs like Beijing and Shanghai, but two out of the many provinces/cities in China is a tough call. I go to China on a yearly basis and am shocked by the disparity in Beijing and Xiamen alone. The people in my village don't even really speak Chinese (more of dialect), and they don't understand a single word of English.

And they have graduated through high school/university in Xiamen.

I might be bullshitting though, but personally I don't think so. It might change, but I think saying end of this year is really...pushing it? My opinion, entirely though.

I'm from Singapore. Can't say I'm really proud of it, but I won't say I am ashamed of it either...

I was only in Singapore for a couple of days, but I thought it was beautiful!

I apologise about the English-speaking Chinese - it is from this article in the Irish Times - simply because the population of China is so enormous, even if only a moderate percentage of the people is learning English, that equates to an huge number, so by the end of the year, China will be the country with the biggest number of English speakers. I accidentally conflated it with an article that said that the number of English speakers in China will exceed the number in the rest of the world by 2025.

Clifford Coonan wrote:Chinese people are becoming increasingly obsessed with speaking English, and efforts to improve English-language proficiency mean that at some stage this year, the world’s most populous nation will become the world’s largest English-speaking country. Two billion people are learning English worldwide, and a very large percentage of them are in China